When You Go Away (31 page)

     Both of them nodded, Carly almost smiling. 

    "I'm serious.  Don't think I won't know what's happening with you for one second." And he closed his eyes, wishing it was 1968, and he was saying this to Peri and Noel, and
they were nodding and smiling like Carly and Ryan.  Like these children, they would actually believe him.  Like he did now, he would mean every word.

     Already, even though she pretended not to sigh, to sink into her sturdy desk chair, to breathe in the smell of a newly-carpeted, clean classroom, Carly felt better.  Back when she started school in
Walnut Creek
, she refused to look in the corners of the room at the stacks of old tests, rolled up maps, and broken overhead projectors piled on the dusty linoleum.  She'd tried not to compare Walnut Farms Middle School with her old school in Monte Veda with its brand new Macintosh computers and HP printers and Sony televisions in every classroom, not to mention the computer lab, the performing arts building, the auditorium that even the high school kids sometimes borrowed.  If she'd thought of all those things plus what was going on with her mother and Brooke, Carly wouldn't go to school at all.

     Though she didn't know one single person at Piedmont Pines Intermediate and tried to smile as the first period English teacher announced her name and the students all turned at once to stare at her, she was happier.  She'd be lonely and whispered about, but this school was clean and ordered like the one in Monte Veda, full of computers, moms working in every classroom.  And the best parts were that Brooke was with a speech teacher right now, and Ryan walked Carly to school and even talked to her on the way, and her mom was just down the street and not crazy any more.  Who cared about the rest?

     But at lunchtime, some of her relief vanished, and she sat by herself at a table with the bag lunch Maritza had packed her.  "Don't look inside until lunch,
Mí'ja
.  It's good."  And it was.  A
torta
, as Maritza called it when Grandma wasn't listening, a thick ham sandwich in a soft roll, a bag of crisp potato chips, and a huge brownie.  She didn't want to go stand in line for a milk, drawing more whispers and stares to herself.  Carly could hear them even now, the "Her mom was in jail," and "Her sister is like a cripple," the story changing like a sentence in the telephone game.  By the time school was over, her mom would be on
America's Most Wanted,
and Brooke locked up behind brick walls in dark mental hospital in England or Bulgaria or somewhere. 

     "Hi.  I know about you."  A girl sat down next to Carly, sliding so close, Carly felt her thigh against hers.  "I read it in the paper.  Mom says your grandma lives up the street from us."

     Carly froze, holding her sandwich in her hands, looking at the girl's black hair, short and wild and gelled in stiff pointy spikes.  Ryan would want to know her in a couple of years, a girl who hung out with skateboarders and smoked Lucky Strikes in the culverts under the overpass after school.  Carly put her sandwich down.  She would just pack up and go outside and sit on the lawn.  Then the girl moved even closer. 

     "But I won't say anything to anyone."

     "You won't?"  Carly had said this too loudly, her voice froggy, two girls from the next table turning to look at her.

     "No.  No one else around here reads the paper anyway.  They're all into boys and shit.  I don't think they know anything.  I've read all of George Eliot’s books."

     "Oh."  Carly raised her eyebrows, pretending to know who George Eliot was, saying with her expression, like everyone knows
him
.  She'd have to go into Grandma's library and look when she got home; the name sounded as old as the shelves and shelves of ancient books Grandma warned her to be very careful with.

     "Are you here forever?  Or do you have to like go to some different house with a whole new mother and shit?  I've read about that.  Maybe someone really famous will adopt you, and you'll live in like Beverly Hills or Zimbabwe or some amazing place."

     Carly shook her head.  "I don't think so.  I think I'm going to be here for awhile.  There's a case and stuff."

     "I've read about that.  Oh!  My name's Simone.  That's not my real name.  I took it from Simone de Beauvoir.  You know."

     Carly raised her eyebrows again, thinking,
How will I remember that name?

     "My real name's Brittany.  Can you believe that?  Like I'm going to go around with that kind of name?  So I changed it last year.  Well, like in December.  No one calls me it though."

     "I'll call you Simone."  Carly understood the need to change, knowing that if she really wanted to, she'd have to start with the past two years or even more, imagining a new life to fill in her story.  But you couldn't just change a life like you could change a name.  All
that had happened and was happening would be with her like the color of her eyes and hair, different from the rest of her families', but all her own.

     "You will?  That is like so cool.  And I mean it.  I won't say a thing about you know, your sister and mom and all that.  It's like our secret."

     "Our secret," Carly repeated.  Simone grabbed a chip from the bag, and Carly smiled, picked up her sandwich that Maritza had made for her, glad to have someone to share her secret with at last.



That night, Carly turned sleepless on her sheet, listening to the sounds of a late spring storm against her window, the push of new leaves hitting the glass, twirling and twisting before falling to the ground.  Carly tried not to think about Maxie, continuously curling and curling in the dog house, trying to find a warm spot.  Sighing, she silently promised Maxie that she'd wake up early and let her out of the pen, sneak her in the laundry room and give her some of Maritza's fluffy scrambled eggs.

     Brooke's nurse walked up and down the hall every twenty minutes or so, stretching her legs, and someone was on the phone, probably Grandma, the constant lull of her voice rising through the floorboards.  Finally, around twelve, Jed and Buster still on their last round-up, Carly got out of bed and put on the soft slippers her grandmother had bought her, not wanting her to "run around like a savage in bare feet."

     Quietly opening her door, she peeked out into the hall.  Ryan's door was shut, no radio or computer games seeping into the hall.  Carly walked to the stairway, and held onto the banister, sliding down the slick wood, her slippers shif, shiffing as she moved.  On the second floor, she followed the sound of her grandmother's voice, and then stood next to the bedroom door, her ear against the cool wallpapered wall.

     "But, Graham,” her grandmother said.  "But, Graham."

     In the pause, Eustace, who had followed Carly down, twisted and twirled around her ankles, purring and licking her bare skin.

     "You can't just do that.  This is not about you, Graham . . . . Well, I know.  But the children?  Brooke?  . . . . I am not the one to call them . . . No.  No.  Someone has to face this with some rigor.  . . . Fine.  You do that, and let me know immediately what they say.  You can't let this go on one more second. . .  Of course I will!  What did I tell you?  What have I always told you?"

     Carly felt an ache in her lungs and breathed in deeply.  Maybe her heart had stopped as well, her whole body trying to decipher the mystery of her grandmother's conversation.  What was her father doing?  Who did he have to call?  Eustace purred, his orange fur muted, his two long front teeth slick and gleaming with moonlight.

     "I know what is happening."  Maritza glided past Carly and leaned against the wall, smoothing her plain cotton robe against her sides.  "I have seen everything,
todas cosas
."

     "What?  What are you talking about?"  Carly's heart was pounding now, Maritza having appeared like a ghost in the long dark hallway.

     "He will not come back.  He is staying away from now on."

     Carly looked down at the cat.  Even though she had seen her father at breakfast and dinner every day for going on two weeks, his shirts ironed and hanging in the laundry room, he hadn't really been here.  He had been on the phone with the lawyers or his wife Blair, talking and talking about his plans for them in Phoenix, but he'd never really looked at her.  Sometimes, she would stare at him and blink, trying to bring him into focus, wondering if the next time she opened her eyes, he would have disappeared altogether.  Her mother, whom she saw only once a week and who was miles away, was more home than he had been.

     "How do you know that?"  Carly asked.

     "
Ay
, well, I listen.  I hear him one night in Brooke's room, talking to her while the nurse, she downstairs.  He say, 'I can't do this to you,' and 'You will be better off,
Mí'ja
.
'  Verdad
, he not say
Mí'ja
, but he mean it.  He want her to be happy, I could tell, and that mean he will not be here.  It mean he will not drag her to that desert he lives in."

     "What will happen to us?"  Carly whispered.  They moved down the hall toward the stairs, and then her grandmother's light flickered off, and the hall was a tunnel with no end, Maritza's eyes the only light.

     "That one,” Maritza said, nodding toward Grandma’s door.  “She's a
meticona
.  How you say?  A pain-in-the-ass.  But she take care of you. 
Verdad, Mí'ja.
  She drive me crazy every day, but inside, she a strong woman.  And she love you all.  Maybe not like
your grandfather.  That Carl.  I like him, but she take good care of you.  Look at your sister already!  Now, you sleep.  Go to bed."

     Maritza touched her arm, and then swished away, the air around Carly full of lavender.  She walked up the stairs, her feet cold on the wood, Maritza's words still in her ear. 

     The day she first woke up back at the Monte Veda house to find her father gone, his shirts and razor and aftershave packed up and resting in some other room, in some other house, far away from her and her family, she'd searched the house for clues, not wanting to upset her mother, even then.  All morning, she’d pulled back pillows and dug through sweaters, needing a note, a receipt, a phone number, but by afternoon, she still had nothing.  As she'd sat on the back deck, the wood wet from a nighttime rain, she finally found what she was looking for, a huge empty spot in the middle of her chest that pulsed and burned, the true sign of his absence.

     Reaching her room, she went in and closed her bedroom door after Eustace slinked by, turning to see the cowboys of her father's childhood ride on without him.  She didn't have to search for anything this time.  He was gone, and nothing inside her hurt one single bit.  Maybe he'd never been there at all.



Carly and her mother were on their knees reading a page from the old copy of the
Sunset Western Garden
book her grandfather left in the garage for emergency information,
flipping through pages for directions on how far apart to space Mexican sage.  Grandpa Carl had dug up another spot, ripping sod away from the fence, and the mean old witch from next door, Mrs. Trimble (who supposedly was a really a nice lady), had given them twelve sage seedlings.  "Plant them in the sun and won't you have a surprise!  The purple blossoms are just wonderful!" she’d said, handing them over the fence.  "I see Mr. Randall even changed the sprinkler head for you.  That's something in itself."

     After a few minutes without finding the exact directions, her mother closed the book and smiled.  "We'll just have to guess.  Not too close together.  But not too far apart, either."

     Carly nodded, and they set the plants in the soft dirt, not saying much, the air clean from the rain two days ago.  They'd come to Grandpa's after her mother had visited Brooke at Grandma MacKenzie's house. Fran was now in the living room with her grandfather drinking coffee.  Ryan was playing a computer game, the muffled sound of guns and blasts and helicopter battles slipping out his window.

     "So how is your new school?" her mother asked.

     "It's okay.  I have a friend."

     "You do?  That's wonderful."  Carly looked at her mother, hearing something in her voice, a lurch over tears.  She wondered why a friend would make her mother sad.  Did she think that meant Carly didn't need her?

     "I just met her.  I mean, I barely know her.  Her name is Simone.  Not really Simone.  Brittany.  But she wants everyone to call her Simone."

     Her mother laughed and looked at her.  If she had been crying, they weren't sad tears.  Not at all.  "She sounds interesting."

     "She is.  I had to look up all these like totally old writers that she's read.  Grandma had the books in her library.  Simone's really smart."

     Her mother took off her gloves and sat back, crossing her legs at her ankles, closing her eyes and looking up at the sun.  For a second with her new haircut and pale skin, she looked like a teenager, not a mom at all.  Carly sat back in the same way, her mother's shoulder against hers, her skin sun warm and soft.

     "So I went to court yesterday."